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College football: New playoff system will always raise questions

Oklahoma State coach Mike Gundy said: “You know, there's pros and cons. Some people say, ‘what about the fifth team?' If you go to an eight-team (playoff), it's always gonna be what about the ninth team?”

EDMOND — Between practice swings on the manicured greens of Oak Tree National golf course, Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops expressed an affinity for a four-team college football playoff.

UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA / BENEFIT: OU football coach Bob Stoops stands in front of one of his former players, Sam Bradford, who won the Heisman Trophy as OU quarterback. The duo were gathering for a group picture of celebrity golfers before getting in their carts to play in the Scott Verplank Golf Invitational, a charity golf tournament at Oak Tree National Golf Club in Edmond on Monday. June 25, 2012. Bradford plays for the St. Louis Rams. Photo by Jim Beckel, The Oklahoman

Stoops was one of several FBS coaches participating in a charity tournament organized by former Oklahoma State golfer Scott Verplank.

“I like it,” said Stoops at the Verplank Foundation Invitational. “I've always said as long as the BCS bowls are involved in it and that the bowls can remain, that's thing, I think, that we've really got to protect. The way it's looking, I'm kind of in favor of the way it's going.”

The system would begin during 2014 and, if approved, replace the Bowl Championship Series. Since 1998, the BCS — with its bugs and occasional clinks — has been big-time college football's operating system.

Coach Mike Gundy's OSU Cowboys finished No. 3 in the final 2011 AP poll and might've had an opportunity to play for a national title under the proposed new system. He's all for a four-team playoff but said that's where it should stop.

“You know, there's pros and cons,” Gundy said. “Some people say, ‘what about the fifth team?' If you go to an eight-team (playoff), it's always gonna be what about the ninth team?